[Wellsy]

It is certainly the case that the collapse of the USSR and change over to the Russian Federation was a bit of a disaster project that the West didn't take the dangers off seriously enough until it was too late. The fault for it lies more with the Oligarchs imo but also the various attitude of the Western Powers was basically "wheyyyy we won, they'll fall into Liberal Democracy now" and obviously that just didn't happen. We were short sited, as we were with Syria and Libya and so on (albeit on smaller scales, though not if you live there)

[seankenny]

Japan and Germany in 1945 were bombed flat.

Indeed, and of course I already know this. So why, despite the destruction of Germany and Japan, do I make a big deal of them having been developed before the war? Because institutions matter in the long run, and they are much harder to create than physical infrastructure. There are a lot of poor, really badly run countries that have better infrastructure than Germany in 1945! Germany had a developmental state which helped create its pre-war wealth and that was a long-standing thing, going back to the late 19th century. I don't know any of the details but I'm pretty certain Japan had something similar - you don't have the ability to project power thousands of miles across an ocean without a high degree of sophistication. Germany had already developed functioning institutions and state capacity long before 1945. Sure, not stable democratic institutions but they could run a modern industrial society, and the twelve years of Nazism didn't destroy that entirely. Yes, they needed the Marshall Plan to rebuild but the foundations of the German state were clearly pretty good.

That's why I find statements like this a bit lacking in context:

Saying that the rest of the ex-Warsaw Pact countries have done fine seems fairly dubious to me. Look at a timeline of 1990 until now and compare that to a time line for economic development of Germany and Japan from 1945 onwards.

There are so many obvious reasons why Eastern Europe didn't develop as quickly post 1990 as Germany did post-1945, not the least being that over forty years of Communism left a really shitty institutional legacy and that is difficult to overcome. Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Baltics are now essentially developed countries which is a very impressive achievement. There aren't that many developed countries in the world. It's a hard thing to do!

The USSR, as was, in 1990 probably had in some ways the best educated population there has ever been in any country ever. Universities etc across the world have benefitted from emigres from there. They had factories, a transport system, utilities etc.

The economic wrecking they then suffered after 1990 played greatly into anti-western sentiment and provided a springboard for malign politicians. The economic system our advisors advocated for quickly led to oligarchy and oligarchs manoeuvre to sacrifice all else in the interests of consolidating their own power - including supporting us-and-them nationalist politicians.

Really? So the USSR was a well functioning system that was destroyed by the west?

I'm going to quote a few choice paragraphs from "The Second Economy of the USSR", a 1977 paper by Gregory Grossman, an expert on the Soviet economy:

"Doubtless the most common economic crime in the USSR is stealing from the state, under which we subsume stealing from all official organizations, including collective farms.  All sources agree that it is practiced by virtually everyone, takes all possible forms, and varies in scale from the trivial to the regal."

As per my point above of these institutional failures being long standing ways of doing things:

"Compounding the picture presented here is the Russian tradition of prinosheniye (literally, "bringing to"), the regular bringing of valuable gifts to one's superiors or others in proximate authority, as satirized, for instance, nearly a century and a half ago by Gogol in his immortal comedy The Inspector General. Thus, prinosheniye is not bribery in relation to a particular act or event, but a general and regular way of ingratiating oneself with authority, and one which is expected by
both parties."

On the connection between the state leadership apparatus and illegal economic activity:

"The next logical step in the development of corruption would seem to be the capitalization of expected future streams of graft, and hence the purchase and sale of lucrative official positions. This step, too, seems to have been taken in the USSR...

"At the very least one can deduce that the purchase and sale of positions for large sums of money signifies the profound institutionalization in the Soviet Union of a whole structure of bribery and graft, from the bottom to the top of the pyramid of power; that considerable stability of the structure of power is expected by all concerned; and that very probably there is a close organic connection between political-administrative authority, on the one hand, and a highly developed world of illegal economic activity,on the other. In sum, the concept of kleptocracy, developed by sociologists with reference to corrupt regimes and bureaucracies in underdeveloped countries, does not seem inapplicable to at least certain portions and regional segments of the Soviet party government hierarchy."

https://public.econ.duke.edu/webfiles/treml/grossman.294 (The whole thing is worth a read.)

Does this not sound... somewhat similar to modern Russia? Couldn't it be the case that endemic corruption has been a long-standing feature of Russian life and outsiders were relatively powerless to alter it? Were there not perhaps already networks of criminality ready to take advantage of whatever system appeared out of the chaos of the end of the USSR? Is a resource extracting economy not fairly vulnerable to this sort of predatory behaviour?

This is without even touching on the argument that your paean to the late Soviet Union seems to miss the lack of a consumer society, huge inefficiencies in production, the way the leadership papered over the cracks by selling oil, which left them at the mercy of world oil prices and removed incentives to improve everything else. The idea that it was all fine and then "wrecked" by outsiders strikes me as patronising to Russians (and other Soviet citizens) and a total misreading of the state of the Soviet Union.

Regarding Eastern Europe not becoming anti-Western as Russia has done, we treated them as friends from 1990 onwards whilst we rapidly started treating Russia as an enemy.

This sort of statement is really questionable. In the 1990s Russia and the US worked together on various projects such as the removal of Soviet nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Russia joining the G8 (as it became) and the WTO, creating the ISS, etc. In 1992 Yeltsin and Bush issued a joint declaration that said: "Russia and the United States do not regard each other as potential adversaries." In 1997 NATO and Russia stated that they no longer considered each other as adversaries.

Or as you'd put it:

From what I can see, all that we have done has steered Russia into becoming ever worse.

Yes, Eastern European states chose to join NATO. Are citizens of those nations somehow lesser people who don't deserve to make choices about their future? That would be the Russian view and it's also the implication of what you've written here. In the light of the Russian invastion of its neighbours, were Poland and the Czech Republic wrong to join a defensive alliance?

And of course, there were ruptures and some of those came from the western side, ie Iraq. But Russia went to war with Georgia (damn those Georgians for prefering the west over Russia), propped up Asad in Syria despite his use of chemical weapons, annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. These were all choices Putin and his circle made. They weren't forced upon them by the west, those guys had agency and that's how they used it.

[Oldmanmatt]

I was doing other things and only just read Stone’s post and the replies…
I’d have (unsurprisingly) been waay more flippant …
I do enjoy a Sean rant (except when I’m bearing the brunt). So many receipts it’s like a delayed internal audit.

Russia, never escaped it’s feudal system, Communism kinda papered over it but it was really just gilding. The current regime is a 21st century version of feudalism. Russia considers all it’s republics and their peoples, vassals and the Eastern block states that rebelled against their rule or influence, as errant vassals to be brought to heel.
This mentality pervades Russian society. Putin has a large body of support, not only through fear. It might be weakening and liberal ideas might be percolating through their society. Still, until us GenX’ers start retiring and popping off in a decade or so, new ideas and change won’t gain much traction.
Most of the “escaped” states had distinct and more “European” systems and societies, prior to the Great Wars and had already made great strides towards liberal democracy, so the glory days of their elders memories were that pre-war era.
Russia and Russian memories centre around the glorious USSR, bestriding the globe or the great imperialist Czars (a bit like our boomers hankering after Empire and British global dominance).
Change is a generational thing. This is true in most societies or organisations (see “scientific consensus” for one).
Perhaps Russia, in some societal subconscious, is beginning to feel the shift, the old guard realising their return to greatness hasn’t materialised and becoming increasingly desperate as they feel their vitality slipping. There’s certainly unrest in the republics and assertion if regional identity are becoming more pronounced (think of music etc here, for one. I see a lot of young bands and musicians performing in native languages. Bands like Otyken that fuse Western music with indigenous music and costumes). Possibly the only thing left holding the federation together is fear of reprisals.

[stone]

Were there not perhaps already networks of criminality ready to take advantage of whatever system appeared out of the chaos of the end of the USSR? Is a resource extracting economy not fairly vulnerable to this sort of predatory behaviour?

Totally. That is why it was all the more regrettable that western advisors advocated setting things up in a way that was so vulnerable to takeover by such crooks.

A lot of radical institutional changes were implemented in post WWII Japan, they were all directed at distributing economic power widely and ensuring it stayed dispersed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_MacArthur#Supreme_Commander_for_the_Allied_Powers . It followed the social democratic mindset prevalent in the West at that time. Widely distributed economic power was thought conducive to creating a stable, prosperous and peaceful country.

By contrast, the neoliberal mindset of the western advisors in 1990s Russia was that economic inequality was fine. They thought oligarchs would run things well out of economic self interest. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shleifer/files/normal_jep.pdf

I also fully agree that the USSR was a very nasty system. I stand by my assertion though that in 1990 the country had some advantages that might have better been made use of. Like I said, it did have a highly educated population. The highest award for Mathematics is the Field Medal. That was won by Russians in 1990, 1998 and 2002. Those people were products on the education system just before the collapse of the USSR. https://stats.areppim.com/listes/list_fieldsxmedal.htm The international Space Station depended on Soviet rockets.

[Davo]

Japan and Germany in 1945 were bombed flat.

Indeed, and of course I already know this. So why, despite the destruction of Germany and Japan, do I make a big deal of them having been developed before the war? Because institutions matter in the long run, and they are much harder to create than physical infrastructure. There are a lot of poor, really badly run countries that have better infrastructure than Germany in 1945! Germany had a developmental state which helped create its pre-war wealth and that was a long-standing thing, going back to the late 19th century. I don't know any of the details but I'm pretty certain Japan had something similar - you don't have the ability to project power thousands of miles across an ocean without a high degree of sophistication. Germany had already developed functioning institutions and state capacity long before 1945. Sure, not stable democratic institutions but they could run a modern industrial society, and the twelve years of Nazism didn't destroy that entirely. Yes, they needed the Marshall Plan to rebuild but the foundations of the German state were clearly pretty good.

That's why I find statements like this a bit lacking in context:

Saying that the rest of the ex-Warsaw Pact countries have done fine seems fairly dubious to me. Look at a timeline of 1990 until now and compare that to a time line for economic development of Germany and Japan from 1945 onwards.

There are so many obvious reasons why Eastern Europe didn't develop as quickly post 1990 as Germany did post-1945, not the least being that over forty years of Communism left a really shitty institutional legacy and that is difficult to overcome. Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Baltics are now essentially developed countries which is a very impressive achievement. There aren't that many developed countries in the world. It's a hard thing to do!

The USSR, as was, in 1990 probably had in some ways the best educated population there has ever been in any country ever. Universities etc across the world have benefitted from emigres from there. They had factories, a transport system, utilities etc.

The economic wrecking they then suffered after 1990 played greatly into anti-western sentiment and provided a springboard for malign politicians. The economic system our advisors advocated for quickly led to oligarchy and oligarchs manoeuvre to sacrifice all else in the interests of consolidating their own power - including supporting us-and-them nationalist politicians.

Really? So the USSR was a well functioning system that was destroyed by the west?

I'm going to quote a few choice paragraphs from "The Second Economy of the USSR", a 1977 paper by Gregory Grossman, an expert on the Soviet economy:

"Doubtless the most common economic crime in the USSR is stealing from the state, under which we subsume stealing from all official organizations, including collective farms.  All sources agree that it is practiced by virtually everyone, takes all possible forms, and varies in scale from the trivial to the regal."

As per my point above of these institutional failures being long standing ways of doing things:

"Compounding the picture presented here is the Russian tradition of prinosheniye (literally, "bringing to"), the regular bringing of valuable gifts to one's superiors or others in proximate authority, as satirized, for instance, nearly a century and a half ago by Gogol in his immortal comedy The Inspector General. Thus, prinosheniye is not bribery in relation to a particular act or event, but a general and regular way of ingratiating oneself with authority, and one which is expected by
both parties."

On the connection between the state leadership apparatus and illegal economic activity:

"The next logical step in the development of corruption would seem to be the capitalization of expected future streams of graft, and hence the purchase and sale of lucrative official positions. This step, too, seems to have been taken in the USSR...

"At the very least one can deduce that the purchase and sale of positions for large sums of money signifies the profound institutionalization in the Soviet Union of a whole structure of bribery and graft, from the bottom to the top of the pyramid of power; that considerable stability of the structure of power is expected by all concerned; and that very probably there is a close organic connection between political-administrative authority, on the one hand, and a highly developed world of illegal economic activity,on the other. In sum, the concept of kleptocracy, developed by sociologists with reference to corrupt regimes and bureaucracies in underdeveloped countries, does not seem inapplicable to at least certain portions and regional segments of the Soviet party government hierarchy."

https://public.econ.duke.edu/webfiles/treml/grossman.294 (The whole thing is worth a read.)

Does this not sound... somewhat similar to modern Russia? Couldn't it be the case that endemic corruption has been a long-standing feature of Russian life and outsiders were relatively powerless to alter it? Were there not perhaps already networks of criminality ready to take advantage of whatever system appeared out of the chaos of the end of the USSR? Is a resource extracting economy not fairly vulnerable to this sort of predatory behaviour?

This is without even touching on the argument that your paean to the late Soviet Union seems to miss the lack of a consumer society, huge inefficiencies in production, the way the leadership papered over the cracks by selling oil, which left them at the mercy of world oil prices and removed incentives to improve everything else. The idea that it was all fine and then "wrecked" by outsiders strikes me as patronising to Russians (and other Soviet citizens) and a total misreading of the state of the Soviet Union.

Regarding Eastern Europe not becoming anti-Western as Russia has done, we treated them as friends from 1990 onwards whilst we rapidly started treating Russia as an enemy.

This sort of statement is really questionable. In the 1990s Russia and the US worked together on various projects such as the removal of Soviet nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Russia joining the G8 (as it became) and the WTO, creating the ISS, etc. In 1992 Yeltsin and Bush issued a joint declaration that said: "Russia and the United States do not regard each other as potential adversaries." In 1997 NATO and Russia stated that they no longer considered each other as adversaries.

Or as you'd put it:

From what I can see, all that we have done has steered Russia into becoming ever worse.

Yes, Eastern European states chose to join NATO. Are citizens of those nations somehow lesser people who don't deserve to make choices about their future? That would be the Russian view and it's also the implication of what you've written here. In the light of the Russian invastion of its neighbours, were Poland and the Czech Republic wrong to join a defensive alliance?

And of course, there were ruptures and some of those came from the western side, ie Iraq. But Russia went to war with Georgia (damn those Georgians for prefering the west over Russia), propped up Asad in Syria despite his use of chemical weapons, annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. These were all choices Putin and his circle made. They weren't forced upon them by the west, those guys had agency and that's how they used it.

Wholeheartedly agree with all of this. I was going to try to reply to Stone’s stuff about why Germany and Japan did well after WW2 but your reply covers it all.

It seems to me Stone that for some reason you feel the need to “blame” the West for how Russia has chosen to act. I agree that things could have gone much better at the end of the USSR but the Russian state has had a large hand in how badly things have gone since then and why most of their close neighbours have felt the need to join NATO and become more closely allied to the West and Europe.

Dave

[Davo]

Hi Stone

The treatment of Japan after WW2 is a subject of controversy to say the least and the way you simplify it to support your own argument is a bit disingenuous.
Also with reference to Germany, Sean is correct the main reason they performed so well after the war was because of their institutions and societal structure. You seem also to happily skip over the fact that Germany was split in half and occupied for quite a while by the West with vast volumes of money being pumped in. During this period an enormous amount of effort was put into rebuilding Germany and its infrastructure. This was hardly an option for Russia. Also I have no idea where you are getting this idea of the USSR having a highly educated and well functioning society. This just seems wrong and against all the evidence.

[ali k]

Thread split?

[Oldmanmatt]

Thread split?

I don’t know, maybe not.

The world is going through significant changes, politically, socially and economically. We are facing an existential crisis, again, though possibly worse than the nuclear annihilation fantasies of thirty years ago (we seem to have dealt with that angst by ignoring it, because it’s now mostly hidden. Climate change is/will be frank).
A lot of that change is influencing our UK political landscape. From reactionary Brexit to immigration, social care, alliances and perceived foreign threat etc etc.
We’re seeing a change in regional alliances and despite trying to step out of that landscape, via Brexit thinking, we’re inextricably part of that reality.
A Quote from Asimov’s “I Robot” (1940s-early 1950s) supposedly uttered in the mid-late 21st century. Where he writes “Robot” he’s actually referencing what we now call AI:


He’s probably not far off the mark, if possibly a little optimistic on the “Golden age” stuff.
Things are changing, immigration, economics, networks, the internet, social media, are all combining to reduce “Nation” as the primary definition by which the individual views themselves. Most pre-internet humans, probably spent they’re formative years seeing themselves primarily as their national character dictated; those who have only existed in the current world, seem (to me) to see themselves first as part of some subset of humanity that isn’t bound by national borders (I dunno exactly how to articulate that, “Trans” is a category that springs immediately to mind, if inappropriately, just seems a strong identity. You could probably name quite a few others).
We de facto accept we are part of “The West” region and cleave to those other nations we perceive to be part of that group, for instance.
If the referendum is reasonably described as a test of whether we preferred to be “British” or “Europeans” then ( and adding the demographic split) then we’re about half way to becoming Regionally identified, primary to Nationally.
To where saying “I’m British” is akin to me saying “I’m Cornish” (of which I am proud and see no diminution in light of being primarily British).

[seankenny]

Totally. That is why it was all the more regrettable that western advisors advocated setting things up in a way that was so vulnerable to takeover by such crooks.

My reading of, say, the article I posted above was that there was no “takeover by crooks” suddenly occurring in the 1990s - because crooks prospered already under the Soviet system.

Thanks for the paper. Is there any particular part of it that you believe supports your thesis? I should point out that this guy, who you’ve linked to twice, was basically a foreign advisor involved with the US aid effort, which was far too small. Meanwhile there were Russian economists working on reforms within the Russian government itself. You seem to want it both ways - Russians are the most well educated people in history but also couldn’t produce any economists who understood what needed to be done. Or if there were, then there is an unexplained process in which the Russian leaders ignored their own advisors and preferred exclusively foreigners.

Jeffrey Sachs says that the chief architect of the reforms was a Russian called Yegor Gaidar, writing:

“In October 1991 I received a call from Moscow, telling me that Yegor Gaidar was likely to become the head of Yeltsin’s economic team, and that Russia would launch radical market reforms with or without the rest of the Soviet Union.”

(My emphasis.)

Oh look, a Russian leader making decisions about Russia!

Sachs describes the Russia of 1992 thus:

“I fully understand from the start that the reform task would be vastly more difficult and complex than in Poland. There were several critical and quite obvious reasons for this concern:

“Russia’s economic mainstay, oil and gas production, was already plummeting by the late 1980s, and this was causing a financial catastrophe for the government because oil revenues were a vital source of budget income and foreign exchange

“Russia was entering into an acute external debt crisis as a result of heavy external borrowing during the Gorbachev years

“Russia’s economic structure was far more distorted than in Eastern Europe, with a vast proportion of Soviet industry producing “negative value added” (output worth less at world market prices than inputs such as energy and other raw materials)

“The Soviet region utterly lacked the history and practice of market economics and democratic governance

“The size and complexity of the Soviet Union, with 15 republics and 150 million people stretched over 11 times zones, was incomparably greater than the complexity of Polish or Czech or other Central European circumstances.”

http://www.acamedia.info/politics/ukraine/jeffrey_sachs/What_I_did_in_Russia-exerpts.html

[stone]

Thanks Sean for the interesting link.

I also found this wikipedia page gave helpful background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_trade_of_the_Soviet_Union

[stone]

The selection process is underway for the next Tory leader. Someone from the Conservative Home website was on BBC R4 saying about how there are slightly more "one nation" Tory MPs than "right wing" Tory MPs. He said normally for leadership contests, the membership get a choice between a "one nation" candidate and a "right wing" candidate and traditionally then choose the "right wing".

This drives home just how much sway Tory party members have over the UK. Again, I implore any of the decent, reasonable people on here who sometimes (unlike me) vote Tory, to become party members.

Currently as a Labour Party member I don't think I have any influence at all. But as Tory party members you really would. All the more so as there are so few Tory Party members.

[teestub]

I think they said in the Rest is Politics pod that you had to have been registered as a member by 24th July to be able to vote in this leadership contest.

[andy popp]

This drives home just how much sway Tory party members have over the UK. Again, I implore any of the decent, reasonable people on here who sometimes (unlike me) vote Tory, to become party members.

A part of me thinks: just let them select the most batshit crazy person possible. They deserve each other.

I know there needs to be plausible opposition and I know their decline will only benefit Reform, but - like I said - a part me would welcome their ongoing self-destruction. We all have bad thoughts sometimes.

I'm also currently enjoying Suella's massive hissy fit because the rest of the party refuses to recognise her diagnosis that even more batshittery is the way forward.

[stone]

I think they said in the Rest is Politics pod that you had to have been registered as a member by 24th July to be able to vote in this leadership contest.

My thought was surely that can't mean 24th July this year. I was thinking long term rather than this contest.

To my mind our country would be much much better if we had a Tory party where the centrist types were at the helm. People who wanted the NHS to work well, cared about increasing opportunity, didn't wage culture wars etc. Rory Stewart ran to be leader let's face it.

[teestub]

Is there potential that a reduced Tory party, with the centrist > right vote split between them, Libs and Reform might actually get us closer to voting reform? Seen a few bits about Tory MPs considering defecting to Reform.

[spidermonkey09]

I think they said in the Rest is Politics pod that you had to have been registered as a member by 24th July to be able to vote in this leadership contest.

My thought was surely that can't mean 24th July this year.

Of course it means this year. Why would it mean any other? The process is set up this way to avoid entryism.

[stone]

I think they said in the Rest is Politics pod that you had to have been registered as a member by 24th July to be able to vote in this leadership contest.

My thought was surely that can't mean 24th July this year.

Of course it means this year. Why would it mean any other? The process is set up this way to avoid entryism.

I meant the Labour Party has a much much longer required period of prior membership than that. Many months rather than days.
Just as you say, it is to prevent entryism.

[teestub]

I meant the Labour Party has a much much longer required period of prior membership than that. Many months rather than days.
Just as you say, it is to prevent entryism.

it was notionally 6 months, but you could pay to avoid this, as many people (120k) did to elect Corbyn. They changed it for the last one to be similar to what the Tories have now.

https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2019/12/16/labour-leadership-election-who-can-vote-and-how-does-it-work/

[stone]

Thanks teestub, that's the definitive link -and authored by the arch fixer Luke Akehurst no less!

[stone]

Is there potential that a reduced Tory party, with the centrist > right vote split between them, Libs and Reform might actually get us closer to voting reform? Seen a few bits about Tory MPs considering defecting to Reform.

Are you meaning the UK getting a reform government?

I'm not sure Reform are really intending to be a party of government. It seems more a campaign group to snap at the heels of the Tories so as to manoeuvre them.

I'm thinking of the saying "the dog that caught the car" about what would happen if Reform did ever win a majority.

[spidermonkey09]

I meant the Labour Party has a much much longer required period of prior membership than that. Many months rather than days.
Just as you say, it is to prevent entryism.

I see what you mean, but I can see why they'd want to allow people who joined after the election loss to vote in the contest as thats a fruitful time. I joined the Labour party after the loss in 2019 and voted in the subsequent leadership election, for example. This sort of cut off seems like a sensible balance between encouraging new members and preventing entryism.

[teestub]

Are you meaning the UK getting a reform government?

I'm not sure Reform are really intending to be a party of government. It seems more a campaign group to snap at the heels of the Tories so as to manoeuvre them.

Sorry one reform with a capital R and one without, I.e. does this current split of voting ranging from centrist right (Lib) to right right (Reform) mean that a drive towards proportional representation voting is now more likely than when you just had 2 big parties scooping up 80% of the vote

[stone]

Sorry one reform with a capital R and one without, I.e. does this current split of voting ranging from centrist right (Lib) to right right (Reform) mean that a drive towards proportional representation voting is now more likely than when you just had 2 big parties scooping up 80% of the vote

Sorry goofy me misreading!

My guess is that proportional representation is least likely when the government has a huge majority despite few votes! The losers will be upset but the losers aren't the choosers.

Perhaps everyone will eventually get disgruntled with the government and then Labour votes will split whilst Tory votes will coalesce (this government's victory has shown that only one half of that equation is needed. Labour romped to victory just from Tory collapse).